Zac Bingham on Forks in the Road, Entrepreneurship and Prioritising Freedom

If you’re interested in learning how to use your legal skills to move into other industries of work, then you’re going to get a lot out of our conversation with Zac Bingham. Zac is a lawyer turned startup manager and business development consultant. Having worked as a corporate and commercial solicitor with Russell McVeagh, and then spending time with White Case Legal, Zac went on to help create Automio, a burgeoning legal tech startup based in New Zealand. To view the juxtaposition of new and old legal careers, Zac is an excellent person to speak with. We covered a lot of ground in our conversation, and carefully teased out some of Zac’s biggest lessons and epiphanies throughout his career. We spoke about his early days as a lawyer, his motivation to change things up, transferrable skills and what the state of legal automation looks like now.

Listen to the full episode to hear all this, plus topics like:

How Automio provides users with their own cloud-based lawyer bot

Why Zac gravitated toward corporate commercial work early in his career

The pros and cons of working in a big international law firm

What motivated Zac to step out of practice altogether

What differentiates people on the partner track versus those who aren’t

How a childhood friendship sparked Zac’s current business

What legal documentation automation looks like in practice

Zac’s adjustment from solicitor to business development manager

What lawyers can do to hedge against the risk of becoming less relevant